Shostakovich and the Soviet State

Jonah Katz
University of Massachusetts Amherst
May 12, 2003 [Edited January 2006]
Introduction
Nearly three decades after his death, Dmitrij Dmitrijevich Shostakovich
remains one of the most controversial composers in the history of Western
music. His compositions are widely studied and admired, his name is
known throughout the world; his life and views have become the subject
of a debate as contentious as any in the eld of musicology. There are
several reasons why Shostakovich remains a hot topic for debate. First
among these is his music, a brilliant and idiosyncratic oeuvre including
two operas, 15 symphonies, 15 string quartets, 37 lm scores, and dozens
of other pieces in various genres. He is almost universally considered to
be one of the great composers of the 20th century. Yet there is very little
consensus on the meaning of his key works; where is he being ironic,
where is he being sincere, and where is he hedging his bets?
A great deal of the current fascination concerns Shostakovich the man.
He suffered bitterly from Soviet repression for much of his adult life, yet
frequently received the governments highest honors and awards. To fol-
low the thread of Shostakovichs career, indeed, is to chronicle the long
history of the ambivalent, volatile relationship between Soviet artists and
their government. At every signicant development in the Soviet states
policy with regard to artists, we nd Shostakovich in the foreground, al-
ternately weeping and rejoicing. He was the rst to suffer from waves of
repression, the rst to benet in times of thaw. He was in many ways a
living embodiment of the terrifying roller-coaster ride that was artistic life
in the USSR. In a similar way, the explosive debate over his artistic legacy
1
can be seen as an embodiment of a much larger phenomenon: the exten-
sive revision of our views on all things Soviet as once-secret information
continues to pour out of post-Soviet Russia.
Early Career
Shostakovich was born in St. Petersburg on September 25, 1906 to upper-
middle-class parents who were liberal but not radical. His father, Dmitrij
Boleslavovich, worked in the Bureau of Weights and Measures. His mother,
Soja Vasiljevna, was a housewife and amateur pianist. She often played
duets with her husband singing, usually popular romances or gypsy songs.
Young Dmitrij wasnt particularly taken with music at rst, but when he
was eight he asked his mother to show him how to play, and his lessons
began.
It turned out, of course, that young Dmitrij was a prodigy. He pos-
sessed perfect pitch and an uncanny memory for music (in fact, he had an
astonishing memory in general). His mother enrolled him in music school
at age nine. By age ten, he was writing preludes and funeral marches. At
13, he played for the director of the Petrograd Conservatory, Aleksandr
Glazunov, who was a renowned composer in his own right. Glazunov
was astounded at his talent and allowed him to enroll in the conservatory
at once, studying both piano and composition.
Shostakovich thrived at the conservatory, studying piano with Leonid
Nikolajev and composition with Maksimilian Shtejnberg, who was the
son-in-lawof renowned composer Nikolaj Rimskij-Korsakov. Shostakovich
graduated with honors in both courses, piano in 1923 and composition in
1925. His diploma composition was the Symphony No. 1 in F Minor, com-
pleted when he was 19 years old. It has been called the most remarkable
work of its type ever written by a composer under 20 years of age.
1
Over the next several years, Shostakovich produced two more sym-
phonies, both patriotic pieces that ingratiated him with the Soviet author-
ities. Many smaller instrumental works were also forthcoming, as well as
his rst opera, an adaptation of the story The Nose by Nikolaj Gogol.
He had gained a reputation as an up-and-coming young composer by the
time he nished his next opera, Ledi Makbet Mtsenskovo Ujezda (Lady Mac-
1
MacDonald, p. 28.
2
beth of the Mtsensk District), in 1933.
The opera is based on a novel by Nikolaj Leskov, a 19th-century natu-
ralist writer. The main character is Katerina Izmailova, the young wife of a
merchant, who takes a lover while her husband is away on a business trip.
When her father-in-law nds out about the affair, Katerina poisons him.
Later, Katerina and her lover, Sergej, kill her husband as well. In the book,
there is a third murder, that of a nephew who stands to inherit the estate of
Katerinas late husband. After this murder, Katerina and Sergej are caught
and sentenced to hard labor in Siberia. On the march to Siberia, Sergej
takes another lover. Katerina attacks this woman, Sonjetka, and drags her
into the icy river, where both of them drown.
In Leskovs story, Katerina is portrayed as being evil, vengeful, and
callous. Shostakovich radically altered this characterization in his opera.
Katerina is presented as an innocent victim of the oppressive bourgeois
society into which she was born and the the loveless marriage into which
she was forced. The father-in-law is presented as a cruel, heartless man
whose murder is somehow less than a crime. The husband is also not
quite seen as a human being. Whats more, Katerinas lover Sergej is the
biggest cad of them all, taking ruthless advantage of her, then leaving her
in the lurch. Shostakovich radically altered the moral orientation of the
story to better t with the Soviet view of 19th-century Russian history.
2
Russian musical society was abuzz about Shostakovichs new opera
before it even premiered. After the premiere in January 1934, the criti-
cal response was overwhelming. From almost every corner, Ledi Makbet
was hailed as an instant classic, a landmark in Soviet opera. Even the
composer Mjaskovskij, with whom Shostakovich never got along, called
the opera stunningly wonderful.
3
Ledi Makbet at once cleared a spot for
Shostakovich amongst the top rank of Soviet composers. Only a short time
later, his enormous fame and the opera that was so well-received would
turn into the biggest nightmare of his life.
2
This section draws heavily upon the excellent discussion of the opera in
[Taruskin (1997)], pp. 498510.
3
See [Fay (2000)], pp. 7477, for a citation of this quote and further praise frommusical
luminaries.
3
First Persecution
In January 1936, the enormously popular Ledi Makbet was being staged in
no less than three theaters in Moscow. On January 26, Stalin and a group
of high-ranking Party ofcials went to see the opera. They walked out
before the show ended. Two days later, there appeared in Pravda (the of-
cial newspaper of the Soviet state) an unsigned editorial entitled Sumbur
Vmesto Muzyki (Muddle Instead of Music). In the article, Shostakovich
and his opera were condemned in the harshest possible terms.
4
His music
is formalist, cacophony, a confused scream of sounds. The singing
is replaced by shrieks. Politically, the piece is reactionary and anti-
Soviet: The power of good music to infect the masses has been sacri-
ced to a petty-bourgeois, formalist attempt to create originality through
cheap clowning. Perhaps the most chilling part of the article is the admo-
nition that Shostakovichs game. . . may end very badly.
It is hard to fathom the effect this article must have had on the com-
poser. It came at the beginning of the Great Terror following the 1934 as-
sassination of politburo member Sergej Kirov. Thousands of people were
disappearing every week, and the population of Siberian prison camps
swelled exponentially. Most of those arrested had done nothing that could
be construed as threatening the government in any way. Even the most
tenuous connection to undesirable elements could lead to arrest, depor-
tation, or death at the hands of the NKVD, Stalins terrorist secret police.
The editorial came, then, at a time when the slightest displeasure on the
part of an ofcial could lead to disaster for the object thereof. To have an
entire article in Pravda devoted to condemning ones work at such a time
was a virtual death sentence. In addition, the article was unprecedented at
that time; nobody could remember such an article having appeared for the
sole purpose of condemning one particular composer in such great depth.
The veiled threat of violence was also a new development.
This was not the end. One week later, a second unsigned editorial ap-
peared, condemning Shostakovichs ballet Svetlyj Ruchej (The Limpid Stream).
Again the magic word formalism was invoked.
5
The message was clear:
4
All subsequent quotations come from the translation in [Seroff (1947)], pp. 204207.
5
Formalism is a term for the artistic preoccupation with form over content. It was
considered elitist, petit-bourgeois, and anti-Soviet. The opposite of formalism, more or
less, is Socialist Realism. It remains forever unclear what these terms could mean with
regard to music. Ostensibly, ecstatic choral settings of traditional Russian folk songs are
4
an all-out war was being waged against artistic freedom in the Soviet
Union, and the Pravda editorials constituted one of the rst shots red.
When the articles appeared, the government was in the process of restruc-
turing the composers union in order to establish more rigid control over
its members. Shostakovich quickly found himself on the outs with the
new union.
A special meeting of the union was called for February 10. One by
one, Shostakovichs friends and colleagues marched to the podium to de-
nounce him. The criticism quickly expanded to take in not just the com-
poser, but anybody who was associated with him in any way: the con-
ductor of Ledi Makbet, the critics who had praised it, the critics who had
praised other works by him. Next came denunciation of the composers
Sergej Prokofjev and Nikolaj Mjaskovskij, who got it almost as bad.
This new wave of repression, in the guise of a crusade against formal-
ism, soon pervaded all of the arts. Writers, poets, and lm directors were
denounced by the hundred as formalists, expelled from their respective
unions, and put out of work. Such an unfortunate soul was said to be
unpersoned.
Shostakovich was unpersoned with a vengeance. Within two months,
Ledi Makbet was withdrawn from every place it was being performed. A
de facto ban was put on the rest of his oeuvre. All but his closest friends
stopped seeing and speaking to him; it was dangerous to be associated
with such a man. He kept the infamous packed suitcase
6
with him, and
found it hard to sleep at night, constantly listening for the inevitable foot-
steps on the stairs.
Several writers have speculated that Stalins attack on Ledi Makbet was
not a spontaneous response to an opera that offended him, but a care-
fully calculated and rigorously planned rst blow in the terror that was
to follow
7
: a wave of similar Pravda editorials and repressive attacks on
Socialist Realism, while transient tone poems are formalist. Beyond these clear cases, the
terms have essentially no meaning at all, which was one of the greatest advantages for
the Soviet government of using them. People in a position of power could conveniently
label any work as formalist if they didnt like it, or if they didnt like the person who had
composed it. See [MacDonald (1990)], pp. 100102, for discussion.
6
During the Great Terror, it was common for people who thought they might be ar-
rested to keep a small suitcase packed with necessities ready at all times, in case they
were taken away with no notice by the NKVD.
7
[MacDonald (1990)], pp. 117118, [Taruskin (1997)], p. 516.
5
architecture, painting, drama, literature, and the cinema. The campaign
against formalism in all art forms became just one front in the massive
wave of purges and terror for which Stalin is best remembered, peaking
around 1937.
In this environment, Shostakovich didnt have the option of respond-
ing to criticism, if he valued his life. He was thrown into despair and
unspeakable terror for himself, his wife, and their unborn child. Although
it may sound like a cliche, the only solace he had during this time was his
music. He returned to his unnished fourth symphony, pouring into it his
terror, alienation, and grief.
8
The resultant fourth symphony was certainly not what was expected
of him at such a time. After his public vilication, the proper response
was to renounce formalism and write his next piece in the simple, tonal,
homophonic style of Soviet social realist kitsch. Alibretto would help, par-
ticularly one sung to clear tonal melodies, and glorication of the Soviet
state also seemed requisite. Instead, Shostakovich nished his most chal-
lenging and perhaps least accessible work to date. The fourth symphony
is unapologetically formalist, and nowhere does Shostakovich pander
to the composers union or try to save his own skin. For these reasons,
he had to consign the work to the drawer after a brief, unsuccessful at-
tempt to have it performed. The work was not premiered until 25 years
later, well after the providential death of Stalin. Having it performed in
1937 would have been the musical equivalent of spitting in Stalins face.
Shostakovich turned to a far more subtle and ambiguous piece in order to
rehabilitate himself in the Soviet eye.
Redemption
Shostakovichs fth symphony premiered in Leningrad November 21, 1937,
at the height of the Great Terror. It was his rst major premiere since his
denunciation, and his fate was still entirely undecided. The concert could
conceivably have ended in his arrest, but it soon became apparent that
this would not be the case. The audience was held rapt by a work of ex-
traordinary intensity and expression. During the slow movement, many
8
See [Fay (2000)], pp. 9293, which includes an enlightening quote from a letter to
Isak Glikman.
6
audience members wept openly. They heard in it a requiem for the mil-
lions of victims of Stalins purges, for the brutalized Russian people, living
in a state of abject fear. At the end of the piece, Shostakovich received a
forty-minute standing ovation, nearly as long as the symphony itself.
The audience reaction alone would not have been enough to save the
composer if the Party stalwarts had interpreted the symphony as a tragic
lament. Just weeks after the premiere, the Party-line music critic Alexej
Tolstoj published his tremendously inuential review, which led to al-
most total rehabilitation for Shostakovich.
9
Tolstoj expounded the oft-
repeated theory that the work was one of personal development, a depic-
tion of the composers struggles with pessimism and formalism, his nal
victory over those twin evils, and, in the presumably triumphant nale
section, an apotheosis of some kind.
Up until the very collapse of the Soviet Union, this remained the of-
cial view of the work. Most knowledgeable observers, however, had
an entirely different interpretation. The composers struggles were not
with formalism or pessimism, but with brutal and senseless persecution at
the hands of Stalins government. The Largo was acknowledged even by
one of the most strident apparatchiki as creating an air of numb terror.
10
The triumphant nale is now widely seen as awed and unconvincing.
Many critics believe this was entirely deliberate, that Shostakovich was
engaging in the time-honored Russian tradition of saying one thing but
meaning something quite different. Shostakovich has even been called
a jurodivyj, the quintessential Russian Holy Fool, who cloaks his deadly-
serious critique of power under a mask of idiocy. The interpretation of the
fth symphony is one of the primary bones of contention in the posthu-
mous debate over Shostakovichs music, which will be addressed later in
this paper. Whether one hears the nale as triumphant or shrill and terri-
ed is almost a litmus test in the Shostakovich wars.
The fth symphony restored Shostakovich to his position as the fore-
most Soviet composer of his generation and a favorite son of the Soviet
regime. He continued to be in the good graces of the Party through the
1930s and the Great Patriotic War. He was shaken to his core, nonetheless,
by the terror of 193637, events which marked him for the rest of his life.
9
For discussion of the review, see [Taruskin (1997)], pp. 521524.
10
Georgij Khubovs review. See [Taruskin (1997)], pp. 526528, for a fascinating look at
Khubovs review and its shocking undertones.
7
From that point forth, he always viewed his personal security as a tempo-
rary state of affairs, something that could be pulled from under him at any
moment. Years later, he was proved correct in this assumption.
Later Persecutions
The Great Patriotic War was accompanied in Russia by a slight relaxation
of state controls. The country suffered almost inconceivable losses during
the war; even in 1989, 43 years after the war ended, there were signi-
cantly more women in the country than men.
11
Almost as soon as the war
ended, however, Stalin forged ahead with his plan to create a New Soviet
Man. Nowhere was this more evident than the arts and sciences, which
suffered through a new wave of repression known as the zhdanovshchina
or Zhdanov era. Andrej Zhdanov was a Soviet cultural watchdog who
was put in charge of reforming the wayward arts and sciences during this
time. His name has become synonymous with totalitarian evil.
Zhdanov began his post-war offensive with a special conference of
the writers union, at which he condemned and boorishly insulted Anna
Akhmatova and Boris Zoshchenko, two writers who ran afoul of Soviet
standards of acceptability. The attacks later came to include Boris Paster-
nak as a central gure. These three writers, along with hundreds of less
famous colleagues, were expelled from the union, denounced as enemies
of the people, and effectively unpersoned. Their livelihoods destroyed,
they were forced to subsist on loans from the few friends who would still
talk to them.
Zhdanov turned his attention next to the cinema, where silent-lm pio-
neer Sergej Ejzenshtejn became the central villain in the new ght against
formalism. Within two years, the famous lm-maker had lost his mind
and died.
Science was up next. Zhdanov commenced the attack on the impe-
rialist eld of genetics, although he died before the campaign could be
nished. Soviet scientists were forced to adopt Michurinist genetic theory,
which held that acquired traits could alter the genotype and be passed on
to future generations.
12
The theory, in retrospect, was patently absurd, but
11
[Vaillant & Richards (1993)].
12
[Post script January 2006: the ofcial Soviet theory of this time is often referred to as
Lysenkoism, after Trom Lysenko. Lysenko was a propagandist and pseudo-scientist who
8
it was catchy, it promised quick agricultural returns, and it didnt require
the meticulous testing or rigorous methodology of science. In addition,
a exible genotype would be a logical necessity for Stalins creation of a
New Soviet Man.
In January 1948, Zhdanov nally took on music. At the First Congress
of the Union of Soviet Composers, Zhdanov uncovered a pre-arranged
conspiracy in which prominent composers such as Shostakovich and Prokof-
jev were forcing their formalist beliefs onto the rest of the union. The
congress became another mass denunciation. The apparatchiki once again
took to the stage to attack Shostakovich and his reactionary individual-
ism. Once again, he had no choice but to sit quietly and listen. When
called upon to close the meeting, he remarked upon the great value of Zh-
danovs speech. His remarks on this occasion are deadpan, but they sound
almost unmistakably sarcastic to the modern ear. Perhaps he meant it to
be ambiguous; had it been more obvious, he undoubtedly would not have
lived to see 1949. As it was, he was booted out of the composers union
and once again marked as an enemy of the people. He became unemploy-
able again, and was able to survive only by scoring propaganda movies.
Most of his works were banned; his recordings and writings, burned. He
lived for more than ve years as an enemy of the state.
The year 1953 brought the much-awaited death of Stalin and the be-
ginning of what later became known as the cultural thaw. Shostakovich
was slowly rehabilitated in the public eye, and by the end of the decade
he had regained much of his former prestige.
His last major clash with the state came in 1963 with the premiere of his
13th (Babi Yar) symphony. Shostakovich used Jevgenij Jevtushenkos
poem Babij Jar for the libretto, a courageous nod to Jewish suffering at a
time when anti-semitism was unofcial state policy.
13
After the KGB tried
unsuccessfully to sabotage the rst two performances, the symphony was
banned outright.
drew upon the earlier theories of Ivan Michurin, a pioneer in the emerging eld of ge-
netics. Michurin, in turn, drew his incorrect ideas on genotype from the now-discredited
tradition known as Lamarckism. Lysenko gave the Lamarckian tradition an explicitly po-
litical bent, currying favor with Soviet ofcials and setting Soviet science back at least a
half-century.]
13
[Post script January 2006: Babij Jar was the site of a major Nazi massacre during
World War II, outside Kiev, Ukraine.]
9
Late Period
Shostakovich developed an increasingly personal, idiosyncratic style in
his late works. He made no more political statements, and encountered
no more opposition from the state. Indeed, he lived his last years as the
Soviet Unions composer laureate, and was ofcially celebrated as a hero
by Pravda upon his death.
His later style is more mystical and ethereal than his earlier body of
work; it doesnt have the same Mahlerian grandiosity that marks the fth
symphony, for instance. Subtle and sparse, many of the pieces seem to
be meditations on death. There are obvious parallels to Beethovens late
period, which are well beyond the scope of this paper. Major works from
this period include the 14th and 15th symphonies.
Shostakovich died August 9, 1975, in a Moscow hospital, after a long
bout with lung cancer and heart disease. His obituary in Pravda was signed
by 85 dignitaries and ofcials, starting with Soviet premiere Leonid Brezh-
nev. He was given a heros burial at Novodevichij Cemetery August 14. In
1979, just four years after the composers death, an obscure Soviet music
critic ed to the West with a manuscript that would forever change our
view of his life.
The Afterlife
The book was entitled Testimony, and it was proclaimed to be Shostakovichs
oral memoirs, as transcribed and edited by one Solomon Volkov. Volkov
was a music journalist, and he was known to have interviewed Shostakovich.
Volkov defected in 1976, moving to New York. Testimony arrived over the
next several years, smuggled out of Russia piece by piece. In 1979, he
published, and all hell broke loose
14
.
14
Throughout this section, I rely heavily on a series of discussions I had with the emi-
nent musicologist Miriam Whaples. Dr. Whaples is head of the musicology division and
graduate program director in the UMass music department. She is a venerable and en-
cyclopedic authority on Western art music, and she very graciously lent me some of her
time to help me orient myself in the sea of contradictory literature on this issue. She was
extremely helpful, directing me to Taruskins writings, as well as Feofanov and Hos. She
also provided me with a vivid rst-person account of a contentious professional confer-
ence she had attended on the topic.
10
The Shostakovich we nd in Testimony is an embittered, cynical dis-
sident. He rails against the Soviet government, communism in general,
Lenin, Stalin, the composers union, the apparatchiki, and virtually every
gure of authority in Soviet history. He claims that he has been a dissi-
dent his entire life, and that all of his music was composed with a dissident
agenda. What appears to be Soviet kitsch is actually sarcasm. The deadly
battle march of the German invasion from his seventh (Leningrad) sym-
phony is in fact meant to personify Stalin. The triumphant nale to his
fth symphony represents forced rejoicing: Its as if someone were beat-
ing you with a stick and saying, Your business is rejoicing, your business
is rejoicing, and you rise, shaking, and go marching off, muttering, Our
business is rejoicing, our business is rejoicing.
15
The publication of the book was a political bombshell, and doubts
about its authenticity soon arose. In the West, Shostakovich had always
been considered a loyal communist. Even when he was condemned by the
Soviet regime, he had never deed it. Over the years, he had published
many articles parroting the ofcial Party line on matters of music and art.
He had even signed a denunciation of Andrej Sakharov, the famous dissi-
dent physicist. How was it possible that he had been a dissident the whole
time?
The Shostakovich Wars
In 1980, musicologist Laurel Fay struck the rst major blow in the battle
over Testimony. She published an article in a scholarly journal that revealed
damaging evidence about the books authenticity.
16
The supposed mem-
oirs contained inconsistencies and incorrect information about the com-
posers life. Entire sections had been copied verbatim from much ear-
lier writings by Shostakovich. Worst of all, these borrowings were to be
found, by and large, on the exact pages that the composer had signed in
order to authenticate the memoirs. Fay concluded that Volkov had met
Shostakovich only three or four times, had gotten him to sign the type-
script under the pretext of publishing a collection of his previous writings,
and had fabricated the rest of the memoirs himself. The Soviet press, of
15
[Volkov (1979)], p. 183.
16
[Fay (1980)].
11
course, concurred wholeheartedly with this reading of events, as did most
western musicologists.
17
The idea of Testimony as a complete lie soon began to unravel, however.
One by one, Shostakovichs colleagues and friends had begun defecting to
the United States. Each new arrival weighed in with his or her opinion on
the memoirs, and a consensus began to emerge: the view of Shostakovich
presented in Testimony, if not the book itself, was more or less authentic.
One of the most important voices in this chorus was the composers son,
Maxim Shostakovich. Maxim denied everything while he was still in the
Soviet Union, in order to protect his family. After his defection, however,
he progressively softened his criticisms of Testimony, conclusively stating
in 1984 that the overall picture of his father was true.
Laurel Fay continued her campaign against Testimony, publishing sev-
eral articles, as well as her own massive Shostakovich biography [Fay (2000)].
The literary scandal, and the subsequent rethinking of Testimony, however,
had left some critics equally convinced that the composers life and mu-
sic needed to be radically rethought. In 1990, musicologist Ian MacDon-
ald published The New Shostakovich, which wholeheartedly adopted the
Shostakovich-as-dissident view and attempted to analyze his music from
that standpoint. The book makes for fascinating reading, and contains
many excellent insights into the artistic and cultural life of both Shostakovich
and the Soviet Union in general. The musical analysis, however, is posi-
tively ludicrous.
MacDonald insists on a rigid, literal, programmatic reading of virtually
every piece in Shostakovichs oeuvre.
18
Every descending two-note motive
is heard as Sta-lin; every three-note motive signies betrayal. The march
theme in the rst movement of the fth symphony is a literal depiction of
Shostakovichs humiliation at the hands of the composers union. Mac-
17
[Post Script January 2006: In 2004, Indiana University Press published A Shostakovich
Casebook, a collection of writings about the composers life and about Testimony. Laurel
Fays essay in this book proved conclusively that the pages Shostakovich signed consist
entirely of previously-published material, that in many cases Volkov departed from the
previous material immediately following the rst page-break, and that in at least one
case he erased some of the contents of a signed page in order to alter those contents on
the next page. I take this to be nal, irrefutable evidence that the memoirs are a fabri-
cation, although the possibility remains that they are based on an accurate view of who
Shostakovich was.
18
Most of the subsequent discussion focuses on MacDonalds analysis of the fth
symphony, pp. 127134.
12
Donalds book is lled with dozens of pages of this gibberish.
Lest the reader not be satised with the opinions of a 22 year-old un-
dergraduate music major, I defer to the opinions of several sources more
authoritative than I. Musicologist Miriam Whaples is a professor at UMass
Amherst, an authority on all aspects of Western art music, and the author
of numerous articles on Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and musical exoticism.
When I described MacDonalds interpretation of the march theme, she
smiled wryly: I dont think it works quite like that.
Musicologist Richard Taruskin, perhaps the greatest living writer on
the topic of Russian music, was much harsher in his criticism of Mac-
Donalds methods: Having ears only for the paraphrase, he is unable to
distinguish his own hectoring, monotonous voice from Shostakovichs.
19
Taruskin has since become embroiled in the controversy over Testimony,
and at times seems like the only voice of reason in the entire tawdry affair.
The intent of MacDonalds book is, I believe, admirable. The emerg-
ing view of Shostakovich as a person does suggest that some of our views
on his music may need to be restructured. MacDonald is simply too stri-
dent and dogmatic in his analysis, accepting wholeheartedly the idea that
Shostakovich was a jurodivy and a lifelong dissident, and that every note
he wrote is infused with a rebellious spirit.
Another landmark publication in this battle was Shostakovich Reconsid-
ered, by Allan Ho and Dmitrij Feofanov. The book is an extremely ag-
gressive defense of Testimony and the revisionist view of Shostakovich.
It is arranged as a mock trial for the book (Feofanov is a lawyer), which
often makes it hard to take the content seriously, but it is one of the most
impressively-researched books in recent memory. Footnotes detailing how,
when, and from whom the authors drew their arguments ll up almost
half of the printed surface. They appear to have read every word ever
written about Soviet music. They systematically poke holes in Fays re-
search, and attack Taruskin and her as naive Westerners who dont under-
stand the subtexts and subtleties inherent to Soviet art. Their arguments
for the veracity of Testimony are very convincing, and it seems that they
may have found several instances of sloppy scholarship in Fays writings.
Perhaps most impressive is the list of musical and cultural luminaries who
contributed pro-Testimony articles to the book: Maxim Shostakovich, the
composers son; Mstislav Rostropovich, a virtuoso cellist, dissident, and
19
[Taruskin (1995)].
13
the composers close friend; Kirill Kondrashin, who conducted the pre-
mieres of many of the composers works with the Moscow Philharmonic;
Jevgenij Jevtushenko, a famous poet whose verse Shostakovich used re-
peatedly for librettos; Andrej Bitov, one of the most important dissident
writers of the last 50 years; and numerous others.
While the book succeeds in conrming the portrait of Shostakovich
presented in Testimony, it falls short in terms of insightful analysis. The
authors are, like MacDonald, too dogmatic in their magnication of ev-
ery tiny sign of dissent in the composers life and works. Their vicious
attacks on Laurel Fay do cast some doubt on the veracity of her work, but
also detract from the integrity of the authors own book. There is an air
of thinly-veiled hatred and contempt that is unnecessary, unprofessional,
and seriously distracting.
Volkov himself has remained curiously silent throughout the debate.
With the exception of a few terse statements afrming the authenticity of
Testimony, he has remained a spectator. In 2004, he published Shostakovich
and Stalin: The Extraordinary Relationship Between the Great Composer and the
Brutal Dictator. In this book, Volkov tries to make a further case for the
theory that Shostakovich had established a jurodivy role for himself with
regard to the state. The book is a somewhat jumbled collection of anec-
dotes and hearsay, historical investigation and wild conjecture. It is not
without merit; many of the anecdotes collected here have never been told
in English before, and parts of the book make for fascinating reading. The
main purpose, however, exploring the jurodivy theory, fails miserably. The
vast majority of Volkovs evidence is his own conjectures and rumina-
tions on the nature of Soviet art, and hes not able to establish that the two
men met more than once. He has a handful of quotes about each from
the other, but he tells a story where Stalin seems to be constantly thinking
about Shostakovich. It borders on ction. With the exception of a brief
declaration that Testimony is authentic, Volkov doesnt mention the con-
troversy at all.
Dr. Whaples shared some memories of a 1998 American Musicologi-
cal Society meeting in Boston that, according to her, remains seared on
the memory of all who attended. The conference featured a roundtable
discussion on Shostakovich, with Feofanov and Ho reading papers in de-
fense of Testimony. At one point Feofanov declared, The struggle for
14
Shostakovichs soul is over, and the truth has won.
20
Dr. Whaples re-
membered the meeting as a less-than-civil gathering, with panelists shout-
ing each other down and one audience member standing up to read in its
entirety a polemic shed written on the topic. Whaples also recalled that
toward the very end, Taruskin, who had been the whipping boy for the
night, had a chance to take to the podium and respond to his critics. She
was amazed at how calm he was able to stay, and thoroughly impressed
with his demeanor during the at-times chaotic meeting.
It is Taruskin, in my opinion, who comes closest to achieving a catharsis
in this epic battle for Shostakovichs soul. His writings on the composer,
collected as part of his 1998 monograph Dening Russia Musically, are
lucid, profound, and never hysterical. He absolutely savages MacDon-
alds book, quite justiably I think, but also offers a coherent alternative to
this kind of tautological drivel.
Taruskin makes no bones about the fact that he thinks Volkovs book
is a fraud. But far more interesting is his assertion that it doesnt matter
whether Shostakovich wrote it or not.
21
He notes that most aspects of the
personality revealed in Testimony have already been conrmed. Specic
insults or slights that have upset the composers friends are trivial per-
sonal matters, and do not bear on the interpretation of his work. Even if
he is the author of the memoirs, it doesnt make them true. Memoirs are
among the least reliable sources in academia, and serious scholars have
always treated them accordingly. Given the fact that Shostakovich was
dying when he allegedly dictated them, he would have had every reason
to believe that these memoirs would be his legacy. How could he have
avoided the temptation to tell his story the way he wanted it to be remem-
bered? It seems highly likely that he would exaggerate, affect attitudes,
and recreate episodes from his life in such a way as to put the best possi-
ble light on himself.
As Taruskin points out, there simply were no dissidents in Russia in
1937. If the nale of the fth were as obviously subversive as Testimony
would have us believe, it would have been suicide. If any oaf
22
could
have gured it out, so could any informer.
23
20
[Oestreich (1998)].
21
The subsequent discussion is based on the brilliant essay Shostakovich and Us, from
[Taruskin (1997)], p. 468.
22
[Volkov (1979)], p. 183.
23
[Taruskin (1997)], p. 539.
15
In the interest of obtaining a modern, post-Soviet view on the issue, I
spoke to Mila Romm. Romm is a pianist, musicologist, and Shostakovich
enthusiast who studied at the Belarussian State Conservatory during the
1970s. She immigrated to Brookline, Massachusetts in 1990, and works
there as a piano and ESL teacher. Although Romm continues to be in-
volved with the Russian music community in and around Boston, she was
not familiar with the Testimony controversy and had never read the book.
24
She balked at the idea of open satire of Soviet kitsch in Shostakovichs
work: He wouldnt have dared. This sentiment matches that of Taruskin,
and it comes from a woman born and raised in the USSR, and steeped
in the musical culture there. Romm did agree, however, that audiences
found their own meaning in Shostakovichs music: We knew he had been
silenced. . . When we heard him, we always knew that without words he
was reecting certain things we wanted to hear.
After sketching the initial points about the unreliability of memoirs and
the impossibility of dissent in Stalinist Russia, Taruskin continues with a
virtuoso discourse on the issue of intent in art. His discussion brings to-
gether ideas from Schiller, Nietschze, Schoenberg, and several Soviet ex-
perts on music and the arts. Although I wont do his argument justice, a
paraphrase follows.
It doesnt matter whether Shostakovich intended his work to be taken
as a condemnation of Stalinism or not. Given the time and the place in
which it was written, it was inevitable that it would be interpreted as such.
This is an enormous component of the meaning of the work, whether he
intended it that way or not. This idea is not new or controversial; there is
a long, illustrious tradition of Western critical thought that holds that the
meaning of art comes partly fromthe creator and partly fromthe audience.
To say that a work such as the fth symphony is a narrow, programmatic
account of the composers persecution is both preposterous and an insult
to the music; the piece is much broader and more subtle. Shostakovich
did not write political music. He uses coding, but in an extremely com-
plex and ambivalent manner. This is the great genius of his music; the
complexity of his coding allowed both the censors and the dissidents to
nd within exactly what they wanted to hear. What is the nal, objective
meaning of the piece? There clearly cant be one; it is a composite of the
24
Oddly enough, Testimony was never published in the original Russian, even after the
collapse of the Soviet Union made such a publication possible.
16
various meanings found in it by various groups of listeners and the com-
poser himself. It is exactly this quality that makes his music unique and
universal, not neatly reducible to one meaning or political view.
Taruskins writings are, to my thinking, the most impressive and valu-
able contribution to come out of the entire Shostakovich affair. One wishes
that other musicologists shared his maturity and insight.
The issues at stake here are much more inammatory than just Shostakovichs
life. The debate touches on the most combustible aspects of life in the
Soviet union, questions of complicity, complacency, and culpability. The
debate brings to the fore the question of how Soviet history is to be rein-
terpreted now that state control has ended.
For many years, Shostakovich was derided in the West for being a com-
munist hack. He often toed the Party line on matters musical and other-
wise, and allowed all manner of Communist gibberish to be published un-
der his name. He never had the dissident bravado of later generations of
artists, like Rostropovich and Vasilij Aksjonov. Of course, they never went
through what Shostakovich did during the Stalin years. Is a man who
signs statements of denunciation out of fear for his family really guilty?
What if its fear for his career? We have it on good authority that the com-
poser, in his later years, would sign anything that the government pushed
across his desk. He had divorced itself, it seems, from the content. It
was taken as a given that everything he signed was just propaganda, and
didnt mean anything. Is that letting him off too easy?
It is the constant undercurrent of these larger issues in the Shostakovich
affair which more than likely prompted the composers third wife, Irina
Shostakovich, to publish An Open Letter to Those Who Would Abuse
Shostakovich in the New York Times in 2000.
25
In this heart-rending letter,
Irina rails against music critics who are interested in scandal above all
else, people who exploit his name, even to the point of abusing and hu-
miliating his memory, and especially Solomon Volkov. She sees Volkov as
an opportunist who barely knew Shostakovich, met him only three times
in fact, and faked the memoirs as leverage to get himself out of the coun-
try and jump-start his career in the West. She rolls out all of her previous
arguments against Testimony and reiterates that the book is undoubtedly a
fake. The controversy, seemingly, will never end.
25
[I. Shostakovich (2000)].
17
Conlcusion
As I write this paper, Ive begun to ask myself whether I believe that Tes-
timony is the legitimate creation of Dmitri Shostakovich. I come to one
conclusion: I have no earthly idea, and neither does anybody else ex-
cept Volkov. Shostakovichs family, his friends, and the musicologists who
spend their entire careers writing about him may never know the answer.
Perhaps this is the reason why I nd Taruskins writing to be so com-
pelling. His insights dont rest on whether or not the book is real. He
doesnt think it is, but hes not so certain as to stake his professional repu-
tation on it. Hed rather focus on whats important.
The more I think about Irina Shostakovichs letter, the more I begin
to sympathize with her. It really does seem like a wide variety of pro-
and anti-Soviet forces have been attempting to put their own words in
Shostakovichs mouth for the past 25 years. Scenes like the one at the
aforementioned AMS meeting denigrate the memory of this greatest of
Soviet-era composers. Whats more, they in no way add to our under-
standing of Shostakovich as a man or as an artist.
The future of Shostakovich studies lies in his music, not his politics.
The furor over Testimony will eventually die down, although well proba-
bly never knowwho wrote it. In time, the people who have interesting and
insightful commentaries on his work will emerge as the foremost experts
on Shostakovich. The ideologues who trade insults over his politics will
be forgotten by history, just like the obscure apparatchik composers who
denounced Shostakovich at the composers union during the Great Terror.
References
[Brown (2004)] Brown, M.H. (ed.). A Shostakovich Casebook. Bloomington,
IN: Indiana University Press.
[Fay (1980)] Fay, L. Shostakovich Vs. Volkov: Whose Testimony? The Rus-
sian Review, October 1980.
[Fay (2000)] Fay, L. Shostakovich: a Life. New York: Oxford University
Press.
18
[Feofanov & Ho (1998)] Feofanov, D. & A. Ho. Shostakovich Reconsidered.
UK: Toccata Press.
[MacDonald (1990)] MacDonald, I. The New Shostakovich. Boston: North-
eastern University Press.
[Oestreich (1998)] Oestreich, J. Still in Debate: Shostakovich, Loyal Son
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[Taruskin (1997)] Taruskin, R. Dening Russia Musically: Historical and
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19